Gormongous

Considering all of our recent talk about the Total War games, can we have a postmortem or a reassessment of the Chick Parabola? It certainly seems to apply to the arc between joy and mastery that most strategy games have for me, but is it a self-fulfilling prophecy, wherein I'm expecting games to start falling flat after I learn all their secrets? Have you ever played a strategy game that seemed to violate the Chick Parabola?

I kept waiting for Christine Love's games to come up in the discussion of Her Story. I know Danielle's mentioned her before. Digital: A Love Story involves a detailed recreation of an Amiga desktop as part of its historical fiction, and both Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus involve semi-blind and non-linear database access, albeit orders of magnitude less sophisticated than Her Story.

Well, there are eleven comments on that article right now, but only one is showing any awareness that sometimes people joke or lie on the internet. The rest are too busy rubbing their hands with glee over such a "scoop." I mean, it's the classic failure of amateur journalism, right? Given the choice between finding something and finding nothing, only professionalism keeps one from choosing the former.

I think I agree, ultimately. The campaign is only good insofar as it provides context for the battles, so all the features to make it a full-fledged game that's fun to play entirely with auto-resolved battles, rather than just a place for generals to pick up traits and run their armies together in high style, are really just cruft waiting to be broken by the player or to break on their own. More and more, I'm getting to the point where, if you can't build an AI to use a feature, it should probably be cut.

I mean, yeah, the strategic campaign has problems, but I don't know about removing it entirely. I've played XIII Century, which is essentially Medieval 2: Total War without the campaign map, and it's a boring and joyless thing after a few hours' play, despite Unicorn Games replicating the Total War battle system quite precisely. There's just no investment for me in playing a series of staged battles, even if there are variant setups based on previous performance; I only really care if my armies are composed of my units, brought together through an independent set of hard-won decisions on my part. As it stands, the campaign is far from the perfect vehicle for this, especially since Creative Assembly has become increasingly intent on denying the player access to truly good units and abilities until the oft-preempted endgame, but that doesn't convince me that the answer is linked scenarios or a static "campaign" instead.

Who censors the censors?

I also thought that the knives were simply a nice touch for a damaged but strong woman taking control in her own way, rather than being a specific signifier of man-hating, since McAdams' character didn't seem to particularly relish the thought of stabbing a man when describing her gameplan to Farrell. That said, I share Jake's implicit hope that she never actually stabs anyone and her decision to arm herself to the teeth is simply a character note.

We've already been over this before, but even if his criticism of CD Projekt Red's all-white fantasy of Poland in the Middle Ages wasn't spot on, it's still ridiculous that anyone would be hounded from Twitter for having an opinion. The hypocrisy of #GamerGate is astounding.

That sounds like a recent exploit. I know that, in Rome and Medieval 2, auto-resolve was reviled for how "unfairly" it was calculated. Basically, the computer would take the two stacks and go unit by unit comparing the stats and assigning casualties, starting at the beginning and skipping the generals, until the amount of casualties for one side or the other met a preset threshold, based on total army morale, for a rout. Since units are ordered by default according to their melee combat effectiveness, the most expensive and elite units to retrain (remember retraining to replenish units? They got rid of it because it was apparently impossible to make the AI do it) would always take the brunt of the fighting, while the trash mobs further down the roster barely ever got touched. Ranged and siege units were also vastly undervalued because, even though their ranged value was used, they got their simulated casualties from melee units anyway. Finally, at least in Rome, walls weren't even figured into the calculations when auto-resolving a siege assault. Basically, it was an incredibly clumsy system with a lot of flaws and I generally like the auto-resolve in the Warscape engine better, although it puts out wonky results almost as often. Like Gaizokubanou says, we're just fans of the series with too much time to think. Almost all my knowledge of Total War comes from a semester in college that I wasted as a tester for Rome: Total Realism, and from applying those experiences to criticisms of the differences between the Battle Engine and Warscape. I loved listening to the podcast, because I have a passion for the so-called Dark Ages as a period and hearing other people echo that passion was great, but I really don't think Attila is where it could have been, from my several dozen hours of play. Maybe, as Bruce Geryk might say, my doctoral studies have made me impossible to satisfy when it comes to late antique and the early medieval periods, but I still hope. At the Gates is coming someday, and the team for Europa Barbarorum 2 is planning some vague "summer release" to be their first full-featured version of the mod.

This is an especially good point. I'd actually be quite interested in a game where the central challenge is balancing the food you need to feed your people with the money you need to protect them, but only if the other factions in the game are also facing that challenge. In Total War: Attila, they most emphatically aren't. You could be the cleverest sort of player, scouting out which of the AI's settlements are producing all its food, and sack or raze them, but it won't hurt the AI in the slightest, because they get no penalties for running out of food. You could outflank them strategically and trap an AI army in the field throughout winter, but they'll be just as strong come spring, because they get no attrition for the seasons. It's impossible to cripple the AI economically, because they get free money if their income drops below three thousand a turn. It's also impossible to surprise the AI, because they don't have fog of war. If all other things were equal, all of these advantages would make the AI unbeatable, but the AI's been struggling to play Creative Assembly's games since the transition to a 3D campaign map, especially in terms of building armies and coordinating them against the player, so in practice, all of these little "cheats" just cover up that the player's playing Mad Dog McCree with the AI instead of being on a level playing field. Sometimes the illusion is perfect, when the Franks suddenly hit the outlying settlements of your small Saxon kingdom with two armies you had no idea that they had, and sometimes it's not, when a Pictish army crosses the North Sea to attack your small Saxon kingdom because you were trading with the Roman separatists in Britain even though the Picts are losing a war with their immediate neighbors the Caledonians. It's funny, really, because I think some of the biggest design failures in Rome 2 are all the little mechanics and features that don't directly affect anything but that the player has to keep touching and pulling for optimal play. It seems like the AI can't really handle them, either!

Thanks! I'm also fairly sure that Farrell's going to be alive come the next episode, so I'm just left wondering why it was chosen for him to be attacked with a sawed-off shotgun in a way that was flamboyant enough to flunk the smell test, besides it being visually interesting to the director. Granted, True Detective is not the kind of show to care about its gunplay, especially when directed by Justin Lin of Fast & Furious fame, but if the intention was for the evidence of this episode itself to indicate that Farrell is dead until the next episode demonstrated otherwise, there are more than a few other ways that the ambush could have been staged and shot to keep well-informed amateurs from immediately doubting its apparent outcome for reasons of basic practicality. I don't know, maybe confusion and skepticism were really the intended effects for us?

It's a shame that there isn't a larger size of this out there, it's just so good.

I finally got around to reading Seconds myself. I admit, I missed the occasional incoherence and flab of Scott Pilgrim more than once, but only because O'Malley no longer seems to be at quite the place where he'll put more than a few dozen pages into establishing a character's circumstances. I don't know, I wish that there had been some lingering on Katie's shitty situations with Andrew and with Max, rather than letting later events outline them through difference. Still, I have no idea what I'm complaining about, because it's still a much tighter and probably more profound work that I enjoyed immensely.

It was a very odd scene, for sure, in terms of firearms usage. Blanks could potentially knock someone down, but it would be an unreliable outcome and therefore probably not something that anyone experienced with firearms would plan to do with any deliberation. Firing a blank at an armed intruder would just scare him into shooting you dead, nine times out of ten, and shotgun blanks also produce a very distinctive gout of flame if they aren't specially prepared to look and sound otherwise. Beanbags, salt/sand, or rubber bullets are more plausible for a no-blood and no-kill option, but that's almost certainly invalidated by the second shot, done at point blank while standing over a prone figure lying on a hard surface. That could just as easily kill him, so why not just beat him with bootheels or the weapon's butt if bloody unconsciousness is the goal? The simplest way for me to read the scene, if it's not being constructed deliberately to confuse its viewers, is that the shotgun was shooting buckshot and the second shot is done so close to pierce the vest or crush his chest trying, but why not the head, as you say? Was Farrell intended to be killed in a way that the body could be easily identified, hence not blowing off his head with a shotgun? To put it as callously as possible, why not just use a knife or beat him to death, after he's on his back? It's not like he's going to be hurrying anywhere after getting shot at a dozen feet, even if his vest blocked all real damage.

If you have a strong personal connection to the period or to the factions therein, I think it's worth buying. If you are just a fan of Total War games looking for the next hit in the series, I don't think so, no. I really do not understand why it is in there. Sure, it made a little sense to remove it when Rome 2 de-emphasized generals as provincial governors, so the three-stat system had be repurposed into a different kind of balance between different styles of military leadership, but generals as provincial governors are back in Attila, so now the authority/cunning/zeal system has to be re-repurposed back into multivalent stats... I don't know, it boggles the mind sometimes.

Yeah, having listened to the episode, Rob and Troy seem to me like two guys for whom a (justified) love of the period leads them to see the Total War: Attila in a more flattering light than I can, as someone who put almost a hundred hours into Rome 2. When a game like Attila is built around a period full of chaos and decay, perennially wonky things from Rome 2 like poor economic tuning for factions and hate-you-forever diplomacy fit the narrative, even if they come from half-baked or defective systems. The whole time that Rob was telling me his admittedly cool story about settling too soon in Salona as the Ostrogothic horde, I was thinking that it was the sort of thing I'd seen in every single Total War game since the first Rome, only it's actually thematic when your expeditionary force is inexplicably pissing off all of its target's neighbors if that force is an unruly Germanic horde. If you can't keep the game's AI from being terrible, force the player into situations where terrible AI seems authentic! Overall, listening to the podcast and playing a final few hours of Attila myself, I think that it's a mediocre game that's brought to life by a setting that's fascinating but under-explored elsewhere in popular media. In particular, the horde mechanics are a great improvement on the original Rome's Barbarian Invasion expansion, but almost everything else is simply jury-rigged in direct response to criticisms of Rome 2. For example, tying the loyalty and revolt mechanics from Barbarian Invasion into the political system from Rome 2 actually gives an in-game consequence to the ludicrous "Your bucket is emptying, do you refill it even though it'll also fill someone else's bucket, too?" decisions of the latter, but it means that the most important values for a general are their loyalty and influence, two values between two and four clicks into Attila's awful interface, while authority, cunning, and zeal continue to be spotlighted as important values even though they directly influence nothing in the game on their own. That's what Total War: Attila is to me: making the most of a broken design by introducing a new setting with new systems that make the majority of Rome 2's awful design decisions feel relevant. I mean, I can't say for certain because I'm neither a game designer nor employed by Creative Assembly, but the latter are adamant that the one-on-one, animation-deterministic battle system is hardcoded into the Warscape engine and that it would be an overwhelming expense of money and time to introduce systems-based physics calculations or even to make the outcome of two units' contact partially independent from the animation library. They could be lying, or at least exaggerating, but either way I don't really blame them, because press and fans will be impressed by highly-choreographed kill animations in a way that they'll never be impressed by the dead body of a horseman whose horse was run through by a pikeman flying through the air and knocking down a different pikeman, allowing a different horseman to penetrate the pike wall (or at least the behind-the-scenes calculations that allow that to happen, even if the animations don't quite reflect it). The latter is more technically impressive, but the former is more comprehensible and therefore easier to sell. There's not really any money in a truly accurate battle system anyway, since almost no one has realistic expectations of how it would be, so flattering their preconceptions with Hollywood-style "cinematic combat" is the more judicious alternative. Why was Shogun 2 better? Each faction shared the same units, with only a single DLC introducing one faction-specific unit to each faction. They were able to be balanced rigorously according to a very strong rock-paper-scissors multichotomy. Cavalry countered archers hard and swords soft, archers countered spears and swords hard, spears countered cavalry hard, swords countered spears hard and cavalry soft. No unit, not even a gunpowder unit, was powerful enough to exist outside of that network of hard and soft counters. Special powers were mostly limited to recreating tactical situations where a unit would have an effect on combat beyond its base stats (usually at the cost of fatigue, which was still incredibly important in Shogun 2; here is where the yari ashigaru's spear wall fits in, although other special powers were already headed to the "instant magic" territory of Rome 2 with the elite units in Fall of the Samurai). In short, it was just a more carefully considered game in which each unit had a clearly defined role that could only be partially replaced by another unit, so there was never an instance of something like in Rome 2 or Attila where I'd throw a mix of Germanic Levies, Freemen, Spear Levies, Bagaudae, and Frankish Spears into a fight because it was unclear which one of them was the proper unit to counter a mix of Germanic Brigands and Saxon Spears, backed up by Germanic Hurlers and Germanic Archers. Discussing why the Shogun 2 campaign is better than the Rome 2 or Attila campaigns is a slightly different matter, though, and much more focused on the inability of the AI to sustain the same rate of expansion as the player on a map of over two hundred provinces. Attila partially fixes that by making the Little Ice Age drastically devalue provinces over the course of the campaign and by allowing settlements to be razed, but both of those also end up disadvantaging the AI more than the player. If the AI actually had to pay upkeep on its armies, which it doesn't have to do in Rome 2 or Attila on any difficulty level, most factions would drive themselves into bankruptcy and elimination before the player even got to them. It's not pretty, not at all.

Yes, it does. All formations have hidden stat buffs and debuffs to make them approximate how they're supposed to work in reality. My guess, as someone who did a ton of modding in Rome: Total War and Medieval 2: Total War modding but none in subsequent games, is that it works like pike formation in Rome 2, which is to say that yari ashigaru have huge bonuses if they're using spear animations while their unit is in its special formation, but if an enemy moves past the animation capture point of the spear tips, the nearest member of the unit "drops" its spear by switching to a sword model and attendant animations, thereby losing the bonuses, which en masse recreate the overwhelming and collapse of an organized formation like that. All told, it's a remarkably clever kludge to force unit-scale tactics into a game that doesn't simulate units except as a collection of similar-but-discrete individuals, but it's a kludge nonetheless, since it makes the most effective tactic against a spear or shield wall be forcing your unit to run through the enemy rather than attacking it, in the hopes that the animation parameters can be short-circuited, the bonuses lost, and the formation neutralized.

The advantage with the old "battle engine" for Rome: Total War and Medieval 2: Total War is that it was a physics-based engine. In the scripting language of those games, units had weight values that were modified by attack, defense, armor, and shield variables, which allowed for the engine to calculate the outcome of basically any interaction from enemy units attacking each other to them bumping into a friendly unit (within limits, if there was an animation to depict it; I recall that Medieval 2: Total War had no animation for units armed with two-handed weapons to attack mounted units, so they were unable to kill them at all, but mounted units are a special case since they're technically two units with different weight values and stat variables calculated together and...). If a unit lost cohesion, there'd be less "weight" behind its constituent members' attacks, making it a noticeably less effective fighting force. The Warscape engine, created for Empire and now in its fourth or fifth iteration (depending on how you count Total War: Shogun 2 - Fall of the Samurai), was not initially designed for extended animation of melee combat and it shows in how it's designed to calculate inter-unit combat and death. A unit performs an action directly upon another unit via an animation, rather than simply placing an action value out there to affect multiple units, and, based on a comparison between the stats of the two units, an animation is selected for the receiving unit. It's an animations-first system rather than a stats-first system. It's a one-to-one thing that works great with rifle fire and bayonet charges, but it is simply not designed to calculate the effects of adjacent unit actions, which are what makes melee combat more dynamic than just several dozen guys pairing off to fight duels on the front line. The flaws of Warscape are not really detectable in Shogun 2, just because of the individualized nature of samurai-style combat, but it means that highly disciplined units in Rome 2, like elite legionaries or phalangites, will break ranks and blob into a formless circle of bodies because, the way the engine is designed, keeping ranks is actually less efficient, with less of your units are making contact and able to do damage to enemy units. There's even a hidden stat debuff associated with "loose formation" because otherwise it's more powerful than normal ranks, since it lets the same size unit gain more frontage and cover more space. The weight of formed ranks behind the front line means nothing, and that's an enduring problem that Creative Assembly hasn't really been able to overcome with unit tuning and special powers.

As a follow-up, I also finally sat down and watched Steamboy, another of the first anime I downloaded. Man, what a pile of garbage! A lot of bad stuff came out of the furor over Spirited Away in 2003, but Steamboy is the biggest mess of sub-Miyazaki influences that I think I've ever seen. It has this incredibly detailed setting of the 1866 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London, but then it throws all of that away in this ridiculous steampunk "science is bad unless used for good" nonsense. Major failures include: A shrill and unsympathetic boy for a protagonist, named James Ray Steam of all things, who violently beats one of his bullies early in the movie but later risks his life defending absolutist pacifism. A shameless Asuka expy who mostly just calls the protagonist stupid for no good reason and occasionally needs saving. Her name is, of course, Scarlett O'Hara-St. Jones, because Steamboy cares deeply about historical accuracy except when naming characters and designing machines. Three scientists, the protagonist's father, his grandfather, and his grandfather's rival, who substitute for each other in turn to form some sort of antagonistic force in the movie. Basically, each of them wants to use science to help the people, the nation, or the world. These are presented as though they are in opposition. The movie is mostly uninterested in giving us the materials to decide for ourselves which is right. Constant, boring, meaningless action in which the protagonist was never in plausible danger, further compounded by flat yet somehow still overdesigned art. The best way for a multinational arms corporation to sell its merchandise is obviously to declare war on a country during its world expo as a "demonstration." This falls apart almost immediately and with absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever. Super-cooled and super-compressed steam as a MacGuffin that basically is exactly as powerful as the script needs it to be to impress the audience. A giant walking city as a final "boss" that flies around using steam jets and destroys much of London. It's revealed that the major dispute between the protagonist's father and grandfather was whether to make it a superweapon or an amusement park. Really, when you're making a fantastical movie about unrestrained technological growth threatening to cause untold human casualties and destruction, you probably shouldn't set it in real history, half a century before the Great War actually did use technology to kill hundreds of thousands, especially if the protagonist's main argument is that destroying a certain technology will somehow avert such a disaster. Man, I really did lose two hours of my life to such trash...

It just feels weird, I guess? In most cases, except for the two Roman factions, the Huns, the Sassanids, and the major Germanic tribes (in essence, the staple of a game in this period), one faction is usually given as a "taste" for other factions of similar style. The Saxons are in the base game, but the Jutes, Geats, and Danes are in a DLC (the Angles aren't even an option, I don't know why). The Franks and Suebi are in the base game, but the Alemanni, Burgundians, and Longobards are in a DLC (why the Alemanni and Suebi are different factions, I don't know; also, another important faction like the Gepids again isn't an option). The Celtic Culture Pack introduces an entirely new type of faction, to Creative Assembly's debatable credit, and I wouldn't doubt that a Nomadic Culture Pack with the Sarmatians and Roxolani is also forthcoming, but as it stands, the repeated feeling that I got was booting up the game to play one faction, finding it behind a paywall, and having to settle for a not-quite-but-good-enough faction instead. It just bothered me enough to make mention.

I am really looking forward to this episode, because I just got done with twenty-hour hours of Total War: Attila, courtesy of Steam's free weekend, and I found it just to have covered all of the bad design decisions in Rome 2 with a wealth of band-aids. For every step in the right direction, like a slower timescale for strategic gameplay and a more flexible province system, there are steps back towards the wrong, like an interface even more crowded than before and more full of pointless numbers and bars to signify the presence of mostly meaningless systems. The new horde system is great, although after double-digit hours of play I was still having difficulty figuring out the strategic value, in absolute terms addressing an entire campaign's worth of discrete decisions, of sacking versus looting versus razing versus occupying a specific settlement, but at least the presence of a settlement-agnostic gameplay style via hordes makes it a decision with some relevance beyond just making the decision itself. The factional politics are still total crap and I literally cannot believe that Creative Assembly doubled down on them, but it's not surprising that someone there is inspired by Crusader Kings 2. The actual combat is also still terrible -- fast and floaty, with the stupid "kill animation" system of Shogun 2 allowing for ridiculous outcomes because each soldier can only engage one other soldier at a time, therefore theoretically allowing a single soldier from a high-stats unit type to hold off infinite inferior enemies like it's 300 or something. The map's still too big, historically important factions are locked behind DLC from launch, and Creative Assembly still doesn't remember that they used to balance the campaign via faction-wide economics rather than counter-intuitive building chains, so the campaign gets dull before it's even remotely close to the finish. I don't know. I actually look forward to editing this post, after I listen to the podcast, in order to acknowledge the points of history-savvy people who see something good in Attila, because right now it mostly just shows to me that Creative Assembly has the ability to read its own forums and borrow fixes to their design decisions from fan mods. Which, you know, is great, but...

Nick, I'm fairly sure you won't see this, but if there is anything that I can do to make you play more of Crusader Kings 2, let me know! It is a game that is evergreen for me and I have dozens of interesting starts to suggest. We could even organize the greatest of elusive unicorns, a CK2 multiplayer match! That applies to literally anyone else, too. Message me and we'll load up a game where we're dukes in the Holy Roman Empire. You'll learn everything from me.

Yeah, that's what I meant. It's definitely a positive change, but it also makes the system more generic and less flexible than the old building system, in addition to being something that should have come up during basic design playtesting. The number of mechanics that have launched in DLC and then had to be immediately retooled is beginning to make me feel that Paradox doesn't do any design playtesting beyond whiteboard spreads and intra-office multiplayer. In the past, they've released new tech systems that bluntly don't work for most of Africa and Asia, but no one seems to have checked.

Wait, people think that Haibane Renmei is terrible? I thought that it was broadly considered one of the greatest anime of all time. It never occurred to me to put it in the same category as Ghost Hound, though. I guess I should stop derisively calling it "Ghost Dog" and get around to actually watching it. Anyway, yes. The Sky Crawlers feels a lot like Haibane Renmei, but without some of the "healing" aspect that makes the latter more of an obvious classic. The mysteries of The Sky Crawlers are suffused with despair, more so than the anxiety or anticipation of Haibane Renmei. I liked it just about as much, because I'm a gloomy fuck, and I'm deeply tempted to break my "no anime purchases this summer" in order to buy the $6.55 Blu-ray(!) on Amazon.

Last night, I finally sat down and watched The Sky Crawlers, one of the first anime I downloaded to my external hard drive when I first bought it in 2008. I remember it being something of a commercial and critical failure for Oshii Mamoru, as well as a convenient breaking point for internet pontificators who wanted proof that Oshii was out of ideas after the Ghost in the Shell and Jin-Roh sequels. Man, maybe it's the expectation that it'd be a mess, but wow, what a slow and somber look at the kind of people who live and die in a war. I don't really want to go into depth, but if you think you can handle the dreamlike pacing and somewhat whey-faced CGI design, I'd wholly recommend a watch.